A few days after reading about all the trouble that the organisers of the New York St. Patricks Day Parade have got into this year I had a dream. In my dream I was there at the parade tagging along - except that the year was 2024 and everyone was wearing a selfie badge proclaiming their sexuality. In the name of equality and diversity. Mine said straight. It was a bad dream I can tell you.
Now - as the Minnesota bard once sang - Im liberal but to a degree; I want everybody to be free; But.... but what really gets me is how every time I hear or read about people like me in the mainstream media these days we keep getting called straight. We are not straight; we are not some sub-group in some relativist social universe. We are Mr & Mrs Ninety-Five-Percent of all known sexual activity. We are boy meets girl; yin and yang. Ninety five percent of the literary musical and painterly muse in the entire history of civilisation. I and my kind are Tristan and Isolde Hamlet and Ophelia Miss Bennett and Mr Darcy John boy Walton and Jenny.
I am also someone who has never at any time harboured any ill feeling towards anyone who happens to be homosexual. No violent intimidatory defamatory or otherwise hostile thoughts or deeds. Just like I dont want to bully or see bullied anyone for their beliefs their race their colour sex or anything else about them as long as its peaceable. I just hate bullies; all bullies even the gay rights politico type. Not being clear about this is one of the great philosophical errors of our era. Set your moral compass 180 degrees from the bullying tendency in human nature and you can then jettison all the politically-correct anti-this-and-that-ism crap that fills the heads of politico paranoiacs and overly-biddable group-think types the whole world over.
If being homosexual can sometimes be a difficult hand to have been dealt with in lifes psychological deck of cards then this - in common humanity is something to be accepted not scoffed at. And in western societies though not of course in many others the dismantling of historic institutionalised bullying of homosexuals has been taken about as far as is realistically achievable given the limitations of human nature. But theres a price to everything I guess and the price tag here has been the growth of a falsely celebratory gay culture that annoys the hell out of plenty of perfectly reasonable people. There will be plenty of homosexuals perhaps even a majority who will also find the posturing antics of Gay Pride politicos as distasteful as anyone else. Banner waving activists are a particular breed whatever cause it is that theyre posturing about.
Homosexuality is not to be scoffed at but the shallow narcissistic mass-media-driven obsession with gayness most gruesomely manifested in Gay Pride this is fair game.
So what exactly was Gay Pride hoping to achieve anyway in a town where being able to call yourself Gay is already a minor fashion statement? And being as they are - to a LGBT person - champions of equal rights do they favour the promotion of Straight Pride? Could be a bad call. Why not quit while they are ahead; like a 700 over-representation in the creative and media industries and in the opinion-forming classes generally. Being a gay couple is absolutely your fast-track route to getting yourselves on any ideal home search type of show on British tv. There are places in the hippest parts of London and New York where angst filled teenagers bury their faces in their pillows crying why couldnt I have been gay like all my friends are?" Ok not that often.
If I was homosexual I would expect to be free to get on with my life my way just like the rest of us. But would I be gay? I doubt it. I might have a few extra issues to deal with; like how I fitted in with Darwins evolutionary theory for instance. So its even possible that I would be slightly less light-hearted and carefree than your average Joe. And there might even be a silver lining to the cloud of my inner mental struggles. I might paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling or write A la recherche du temps perdu. But this would not be nearly so likely if I was so full of self-congratulatory narcissism that I went about waving my Gay Pride banner on the New York St. Patricks Day Parade even though this was completely beside the point.
Fact of the matter is this: homosexuality is just something that happens to some people for whatever reason but doesnt happen to most. It is something that to most people always did and ultimately always will seem a bit queer. It is not to be sneered at but nor is it to be celebrated. It is just one small part of one compartment on the streetcar named desire.
And as for same sex marriage? Have it; dont have it; Whatever. There are some decent grown up people who have come to opposing positions on this one I guess. They are hugely outnumbered by the majority of what the chatterati refer to as you the public out there who have other you the public type issues to obsess about instead. But in a world where untold numbers of innocent people are being terrorised and slaughtered on a daily basis in places unbound and often unreported because (in media speak) they have failed to capture the public imagination" could the column inches devoted to gay marriage in the mainstream liberal media perhaps be scaled back from now on to something more in proportion to the numbers of people who actually give a damn. Now that would be Progress. And with that thought I am gone with the wind.
A few days after reading about all the trouble that the organisers of the New York St. Patricks Day Parade have got into this year I had a dream. In my dream I was there at the parade tagging along - except that the year was 2024 and everyone was wearing a selfie badge proclaiming their sexuality. In the name of equality and diversity. Mine said straight. It was a bad dream I can tell you.
Now - as the Minnesota bard once sang - Im liberal but to a degree; I want everybody to be free; But.... but what really gets me is how every time I hear or read about people like me in the mainstream media these days we keep getting called straight. We are not straight; we are not some sub-group in some relativist social universe. We are Mr & Mrs Ninety-Five-Percent of all known sexual activity. We are boy meets girl; yin and yang. Ninety five percent of the literary musical and painterly muse in the entire history of civilisation. I and my kind are Tristan and Isolde Hamlet and Ophelia Miss Bennett and Mr Darcy John boy Walton and Jenny.
I am also someone who has never at any time harboured any ill feeling towards anyone who happens to be homosexual. No violent intimidatory defamatory or otherwise hostile thoughts or deeds. Just like I dont want to bully or see bullied anyone for their beliefs their race their colour sex or anything else about them as long as its peaceable. I just hate bullies; all bullies even the gay rights politico type. Not being clear about this is one of the great philosophical errors of our era. Set your moral compass 180 degrees from the bullying tendency in human nature and you can then jettison all the politically-correct anti-this-and-that-ism crap that fills the heads of politico paranoiacs and overly-biddable group-think types the whole world over.
If being homosexual can sometimes be a difficult hand to have been dealt with in lifes psychological deck of cards then this - in common humanity is something to be accepted not scoffed at. And in western societies though not of course in many others the dismantling of historic institutionalised bullying of homosexuals has been taken about as far as is realistically achievable given the limitations of human nature. But theres a price to everything I guess and the price tag here has been the growth of a falsely celebratory gay culture that annoys the hell out of plenty of perfectly reasonable people. There will be plenty of homosexuals perhaps even a majority who will also find the posturing antics of Gay Pride politicos as distasteful as anyone else. Banner waving activists are a particular breed whatever cause it is that theyre posturing about.
Homosexuality is not to be scoffed at but the shallow narcissistic mass-media-driven obsession with gayness most gruesomely manifested in Gay Pride this is fair game.
So what exactly was Gay Pride hoping to achieve anyway in a town where being able to call yourself Gay is already a minor fashion statement? And being as they are - to a LGBT person - champions of equal rights do they favour the promotion of Straight Pride? Could be a bad call. Why not quit while they are ahead; like a 700 over-representation in the creative and media industries and in the opinion-forming classes generally. Being a gay couple is absolutely your fast-track route to getting yourselves on any ideal home search type of show on British tv. There are places in the hippest parts of London and New York where angst filled teenagers bury their faces in their pillows crying why couldnt I have been gay like all my friends are?" Ok not that often.
If I was homosexual I would expect to be free to get on with my life my way just like the rest of us. But would I be gay? I doubt it. I might have a few extra issues to deal with; like how I fitted in with Darwins evolutionary theory for instance. So its even possible that I would be slightly less light-hearted and carefree than your average Joe. And there might even be a silver lining to the cloud of my inner mental struggles. I might paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling or write A la recherche du temps perdu. But this would not be nearly so likely if I was so full of self-congratulatory narcissism that I went about waving my Gay Pride banner on the New York St. Patricks Day Parade even though this was completely beside the point.
Fact of the matter is this: homosexuality is just something that happens to some people for whatever reason but doesnt happen to most. It is something that to most people always did and ultimately always will seem a bit queer. It is not to be sneered at but nor is it to be celebrated. It is just one small part of one compartment on the streetcar named desire.
And as for same sex marriage? Have it; dont have it; Whatever. There are some decent grown up people who have come to opposing positions on this one I guess. They are hugely outnumbered by the majority of what the chatterati refer to as you the public out there who have other you the public type issues to obsess about instead. But in a world where untold numbers of innocent people are being terrorised and slaughtered on a daily basis in places unbound and often unreported because (in media speak) they have failed to capture the public imagination" could the column inches devoted to gay marriage in the mainstream liberal media perhaps be scaled back from now on to something more in proportion to the numbers of people who actually give a damn. Now that would be Progress. And with that thought I am gone with the wind.